Loop-free routing using diffusing computations
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Highly dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector routing (DSDV) for mobile computers
SIGCOMM '94 Proceedings of the conference on Communications architectures, protocols and applications
SmartBridge: a scalable bridge architecture
Proceedings of the conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communication
NCA '03 Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications
Etherfuse: an ethernet watchdog
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Distributed path computation without transient loops: an intermediate variables approach
ITC20'07 Proceedings of the 20th international teletraffic conference on Managing traffic performance in converged networks
Simple protocol enhancements of Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol over ring topologies
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
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Ethernet's high performance, low cost, and ubiquity have made it the dominant networking technology for many application domains. Unfortunately, its distributed forwarding topology computation protocol-the Rapid Spanning Tree Pro-tocol (RSTP)-is known to suffer from a classic count-to-infinity problem. However, the cause and implications of this problem are neither documented nor understood. This paper has three main contributions. First, we identify the exact conditions under which the count-to-infinity problem manifests itself, and we characterize its effect on forwarding topology convergence. Second, we have discovered that a forwarding loop can form during count to infinity, and we provide a detailed explanation. Third, we propose a simple and effective solution called RSTP with Epochs. This solution guarantees that the forwarding topology converges in at most one round-trip time across the network and eliminates the possibility of a count-to-infinity induced forwarding loop.